This invention relates generally to remote controls and, more particularly, to a system and method for automatically setting up a universal remote control to control the operation of one or more devices.
Universal remote controls used to control the operations of a number of various types of devices such as televisions, video cassette recorders (VCRs), cable boxes, disk players, digital video recorders (DVRs), thermostats, fans, HVAC equipment, etc. are known in the art. Examples of such remote controls can be seen in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,255,313 and 5,552,917. In one method of setting up a universal remote control to communicate with a given device, command codes are manually learned from a remote control provided by the manufacturer of the given device (U.S. Pat. No. 4,623,887). In other methods of setting up a universal remote control, a user manually configures the universal remote control to select appropriate command codes from a command code library (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,872,562, 5,614,906, 4,959,810, 4,774,511, and 4,703,359). These methods for manually setting up a universal remote control, however, have the problem of being demanding, exacting and generally frustrating for many users.